


Green Broke

by hedera_helix



Category: Shingeki no Kyojin | Attack on Titan
Genre: Alternate Universe - 1960s, Alternate Universe - Cowboy AU, M/M, Period-Typical Homophobia, Rural United States, Sexual Content
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2017-06-04
Updated: 2017-07-24
Packaged: 2018-11-08 23:41:21
Rating: Mature
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 4
Words: 22,899
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/11092350
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/hedera_helix/pseuds/hedera_helix
Summary: Nothing much new ever happened on the ranch.





	1. Chapter 1

**Author's Note:**

> So here is my eruri cowboy AU, inspired by (you guessed it) Brokeback Mountain - as well as a road trip I took years ago during which my sister made us all listen to country music. 
> 
> I have to admit I don't know a whole lot about cowboy country or the way of life thereabouts, nor am I a hundred percent confident with the kind of language I use here. But it's a fanfic so at the end of the day who gives a shit. 
> 
> Enjoy!

It must’ve been one of them searing hot days. Erwin rolled the word around on his tongue to taste the sound and feel of it. That’s just what it was – one of them searing hot days when the sky seemed to curve on its edges like the sides of a bowl over the vast, dusty green. He pushed his hat back toward his neck and let the sun bear down mercilessly on his freckled face, smiling a little at that word. He liked that sort of thing, picking up them ways to say what something was from this book or that and then making them fit something else. He’d read somewhere how a pan could be searing hot so he’d thought to use it for this here hot day as well. He thought of things like that sometimes, did Erwin.

He turned to look across the yard at the house, just making out the shapes of Pa and Old Man Zacharius on the porch; the waves of heat bouncing off the dusty grass made them writhe and ripple before his eyes. Erwin glanced down at his wrist watch; it was getting to about time. He grabbed the bucket and the rag off the pickup truck, giving its shiny surface one more heated brush with his hand before heading up to the house, emptying the bucket by the corner where the gutters ran and taking it to the back porch to drip with the rag on the railing. He looked at the car again as he joined Pa and Old Man Zacharius on the front porch; it looked even better from a distance.

“That there’s a fine truck,” Old Man Zacharius said, looking over at the car too. “Well worth the money, that’s my thinkin’.”

Erwin nodded along; the pickup shone flaming red, even the bottom now that he was done washing off the dust. It was just like the truck he’d seen in town once belonged to one of them rich cattle ranchers come up from Texas for whatever business and it had taken Erwin years getting the money together. He looked at it with pride while Pa got up on his good leg to spit over the railing.

“Ain’t no family this size need two trucks,” Pa grunted as he sat back down in the rocking chair. “Greed and vanity. That’s two sins right there.” He’d said the same thing when Erwin’d first asked about the truck, hearing how Flagon Turret was selling one just like the truck he’d seen in town. Suddenly Erwin realized the old man ain’t ever gonna stop saying it.

“The old truck’s only got a couple years left in it,” Erwin told him like he had that first time.

Old Man Zacharius nodded along. “He ain’t wrong ‘bout that, you know,” he said. “Not enough years to be haulin’ them little ones off to church on Sundays once they starts comin’.”

Erwin’s insides felt hot with shame, but Pa merely grunted, sounding like he didn’t put much stock in this kind of fortune telling. They all fell silent watching the pickup until Erwin remembered to look at his watch again.

“What time was it now, Pa?” he asked then, shaking the silence.

“Midday,” Pa grunted, grabbing his knee and yanking his leg up to rest on the stool in front of the chair that creaked when it started rocking stiffly.

“I oughta get goin’ soon,” Erwin said more to himself than Pa or Old Man Zacharius. “He at Missus Hardy’s, you say?”

“And you couldn’t miss him,” Old Man Zacharius said and started laughing roughly, like there was about a bucketful of phlegm stuck in his throat; Erwin remembered Ma telling him it’s how your voice got from chewing too much tobacco. “I ain’t ever gonna understand why you gave the job to that one when there weren’t even no lack of choice.”

Pa’s face grew red with anger and Erwin turned back toward the pickup when he started, “There ain’t no way I’m gonna let any young buck waltz in here and start tellin’ me what I ought to pay him for his work. They gonna take the money I pay them or they can find work somewhere else.” He did his ranting short this time and they all went quiet again.

Something about it bothered Erwin but he shook it off and finally said, “Well, I oughta get goin’,” crossed the yard, got in the pickup and drove off along the only road to town.

He’d been out fishing with Big Mike when the feller’d come asking for a job, saying they’d told him in the post office they might be looking for help on the farm, on account of having just one son to help out and Old Smith’s leg gone bad in the war; all that he said they’d told him. Pa not liking his leg being mentioned had gone sour on this feller on the spot. Seemed there’d been something else off about him with Old Man Zacharius making fun of it all and Pa sounding the night before like this feller wasn’t gonna stay very long and wasn’t hardly fit for the job.

It’d been a Wednesday, and Ma had wanted to set about making the guest place ready for him but the feller’d said he was staying at Mrs. Hardy’s and was all paid through the end of the week so he’d stay put till then if that suited them, and if they could spare someone come pick him up on Sunday. They’d settled for midday and Pa’d been all sour since, saying this feller was cheating him off half a day’s work starting on a Sunday, but since everybody knew he wasn’t about to hire no neighbour’s son, whom he thought were all good-for-nothings like their daddies, didn’t seem he had much of a choice. The feller was an out-of-towner from somewhere up northways, been here and there he’d said, done ranch work before, oh yes, grown up on a ranch, though not as big as theirs, so he knew the work alright and was well and able to do it too. Said he’d been a ranch hand more times than he could count, prodded cattle on stockyards and done some bronc busting too, so he knew the life and wasn’t afraid of hard work. He’d not argued about the pay, which Erwin supposed had been a slim comfort to Pa and had all but guaranteed him the job, though he may not have known it. All the feller had hoped for was a clean room and a chance to do his own washing, which was a strange enough thing to ask for now that Erwin came to think about it.

He drove on along the road, the sun still bearing down and making the pickup hot, but there was no rolling down of windows now on account of the dust brought on by the rains they’d been missing all summer. So he sweated down his neck and threw his hat on the passenger seat, running a hand along his hair and smoothing it down to that neat split he’d combed up for church that morning. There was nobody else on the road which was no wonder on a Sunday, and Erwin leaned back and shifted the gear up; in the distance on his right he could see Zacharius’ ranch, a few bigger buildings rising out of the vast expanse of grass above which the sky stretched out unchanging pale blue as far as the eye could see. There were no other ranches between here and the town. To Erwin the landscape was at the same time overly familiar and beautiful like he was seeing it for the first time. That’s what the land was to him; every shade of the evening sky made him feel a kind of dread, a fear of never seeing the sky so beautiful again. Of course he always did in the end, which is what made his roots so strong, even in times of doubt.

In the vast openness of the landscape he could see the town long before he reached it. There was another funny thing, the town; it’d always stayed the same and he’d seen it so many times if he had to describe it to someone, name the shops and all them houses of the people who lived there, he probably wouldn’t be able to. It was strange like that, how when you saw something often enough you started to not see it at all. Like if you had to tell someone who’d never seen your folks how they look, you suddenly wouldn’t be able to name the color of your mother’s eyes. He’d read in the dictionary that it was called a paradox, when something was like one thing but was the opposite of that thing at the same time. Or so he’d understood it. He liked that word paradox, did Erwin. It was one of them words that shone a light on them murky shades between Sin and Grace. Erwin figured it was good to sometimes spread things out a bit, not have them be so narrow – a man needed to think about things, and think about them for himself. At the end of the day there wasn’t much else a man could do, Scripture being so full of them paradoxes as well.

He pulled up by Mrs. Hardy’s, a boarding house that’d been running there on the edge of town since before Erwin knew what a boarding house was. It was an old building in relatively good repair considering Mr. Hardy had been dead for longer than Erwin had been alive. He’d never seen the inside of it, never having needed room and board so close to home (or farther neither, since he’d never been farther than three towns over in his life) but Big Mike’d told him it had about half a dozen rooms to let with two bathrooms, one up and one downstairs, and a big kitchen in the middle. Some folks said that during times of strife the house had been a brothel more often than once, but Erwin didn’t listen to that kind of talk.

He turned off the engine and jumped out of the pickup, putting his hat back on as he glanced at his watch – about ten to. He leaned on the side of the truck, putting his weight on the heels of his boots as he looked townways down the street. Somewhere inside the house he could hear people talking and the radio was on playing some old Patsy Cline song or other, Erwin wasn’t sure. The minutes ticked by and the sun grew hotter on the metal shell of the pickup but Erwin liked the relentless heat today, even though it raised those beads of sweat on the skin of his neck.

When someone finally stepped out of the house, Erwin looked up and he could see right away why it was Pa and Old Man Zacharius were laughing at this feller. He came through the door saying his thank yous to Mrs. Hardy, lugging an army bag on his back that was near as big as he was, for Erwin would truly have been surprised if he stood even 5’5” as he was, even with them boots on. He looked around from under the brim of his hat that was black while he was standing in the shadow of the building, but as soon as he stepped toward the car and into the sunlight, Erwin could see that it was actually dark green. He squinted through the light at Erwin and nodded.

“You Smith?” he asked in a voice that was surprisingly low and resonant; like the first whispers of thunder before a big storm. At least that’s how it sounded to Erwin.

“Yup,” Erwin replied, kicking at the dusty ground with the toe of his boot as he got off the pickup. “You the feller come work on the ranch?” he asked back and the stranger’s expression tightened a little.

“Would look that way now wouldn’t it?” he said, walking broadly over to the pickup and throwing the army bag up on the back before climbing on the front seat. Erwin stood still for a few seconds, not really knowing what he’d expected. He joined the stranger in the stuffy car and turned the keys in the ignition. They were halfway back to the farm before either one of them talked again.

“This is a good truck,” the stranger remarked; he’d taken off his hat and underneath his hair was blacker than a sinner’s heart, and shaved almost clean on the sides and neck – a strange sort of way to wear your hair, thought Erwin.

“It runs good,” Erwin admitted and as the silence returned he rushed to break it with, “The engine is….good” which the stranger didn’t say much anything to, just made a low grunt of a reply. “I only got it about a year ago.”

The truck rattled on along the dusty road as they drove by Zacharius’ ranch on their left.

“Whose place is that?” the stranger asked suddenly, peering out the window.

“That’s Old Man Zacharius’ ranch,” Erwin told the man earnestly. “He’s got a son ‘bout my age. We been friends a long time, Big Mike and I have. They might come by the farm one day so you might meet them. And Big Mike helps out around our ranch too whenever he can spare the time.”

The stranger grunted again. “I already met the old man,” he replied, leaning his back on the seat of the car and stretching his legs out; they didn’t reach very far even so and Erwin could still see all but the toes of them black boots he was wearing.

The quieter it got in the truck the more Erwin had a mind to say something about that, how little this feller was, but his Ma sure hadn’t raised him to be as rude as that. So he kept his eyes on the road and stayed as quiet as the stranger and after a while it stopped feeling so strange. It was actually quite a nice thing, thought Erwin. People were always in such a hurry to talk it didn’t leave much time for thinking, or so it seemed to Erwin now, being in the truck with this here feller, not saying a word.

In the silence his thoughts turned back to the way Pa and Old Man Zacharius were talking earlier and doubting this man and whether he was good for the work. It was easy to see why they were saying that. It weren’t just that he was kind of short for a man but now that Erwin looked at him he didn’t seem very old neither, probably some years younger than he himself was and there was no way to deny that he was overall small. Not frail, it didn’t seem that way to Erwin, not dainty like a girl but lean and tough as new leather, kind of still somehow, like a colt that’s been saddled and bridled for the first time will stand still, just waiting to throw them off. Yup. That’s what he reminded Erwin of. And at the end of the day there wasn’t much he stood to lose for keeping an open mind about the feller – until he’d seen him work at least. After all, Ma’d always said that God gives us all special gifts according to what he expects of us, and seeing things like that there was no knowing what this feller could do just by looking at him, even if you stared long and hard.

Erwin slowed down as he turned on the little dirt road leading up to the house. From the corner of his eye he could see the stranger looking out the window across the land, squinting to see the grass lands spreading out behind the main buildings, the dots of cows here and there like crumbs on a plate.

“So you worked on a ranch before?” Erwin asked him just to get some conversation going and the stranger scoffed quietly.

“I’ve worked on farms much bigger than this,” he replied and Erwin couldn’t help but feel a bit trodden down by that, until the man continued, “They run them places like labor camps. If I was the praying type, and if prayers worked for shit in the first place, I’d pray I ain’t ever gotta work on one of ‘em again in my life.”

Erwin stopped the truck in a hurry, suddenly and half a dozen yards farther from the house than he usually did; the man put his hat back on and was halfway out the car by the time Erwin found the right words.

“It ain’t my place to tell you what to say and what not,” he started as the man sat back down, looking at him turning the keys over in his fingers, “but you maybe oughta watch your mouth some. It don’t sit right with Pa to have people cussing under his roof. ‘Specially not on a Sunday.”

The man looked to Erwin for a moment like he was gonna start laughing despite the frown he’d worn pretty close to the whole time. In the end he just pulled the brim of his hat closer to his face and looked Erwin dead in the eyes. “You’re right about that,” he said. “It ain’t your place to tell me what to say.”

And just like that he jumped out of the truck and slammed the door. By the time Erwin’d done the same the man had grabbed his army bag; Erwin could see he’d had to step on the tyre rim to reach it. He followed the feller up to the house, running past him on the porch steps to show him in. He dropped the army bag by the door but didn’t take off his hat even when Erwin hung his on a nail; it made Erwin feel like the feller didn’t mean to stay too long in the house. Erwin led him farther to where Pa and Ma were sitting around the kitchen table. When they stepped in, Ma turned down the sound on the radio. Pa turned a little on his chair, looking the feller up and down like he didn’t like what he was seeing.

“So,” he started, and Erwin didn’t know why he was feeling so nervous now, like he was fearing for the feller’s sake what Pa was gonna say. “Guess you ain’t run off on us at least.”

“Would look that way,” the feller said again, just like he’d said to Erwin who was really hoping now the feller would stop acting so darn disrespectful. “If I say I’m gonna do somethin’, I’m gonna do it. Simple as that.”

Pa was still eyeing the stranger like he was about to grab their Sunday spoons and run out the door. “Was it Levi you said your name was?” he asked, rolling a cigarette.

“My mama’s name was Ackerman,” the man said. “As far as my knowing goes that’s all the names she ever gave me.”

“Levi Ackerman,” Pa repeated like tasting the name on his tongue and deciding he didn’t like it. “Now what sorta name is that?”

“It’s from the Bible,” the feller replied and Erwin near flinched at that. “Thought you mighta heard about it once or twice.”

Pa’s face went as dark as the sky before a tornado’s coming down. “You better watch that mouth of yours now,” he whispered, pointing a finger at the man. “What kind of people do you come from to be as prideful as that?”

“I ain’t got no people,” Levi said and it looked to Erwin as though he was planting his heels more firmly on the floor. “My mouth don’t get in the way when I work so I don’t see why it oughta be any business of yours.”

For a moment Pa looked like he was all out of words until he spoke up again, moving past the feller’s remarks like he’d decided he weren’t gonna give them the time of day. “There’s a room off the barn where you’ll sleep. You can get your breakfast, lunch and dinner from the kitchen, but you ain’t gonna eat here. On Sundays you’ll join us for the service and say nothin’ about it. On Saturdays my wife will do your washing.”

“The rest suits me fine,” Levi said, “but I’ll do my own washing.”

“It wouldn’t be any trouble,” Ma chimed in softly, but the feller shook his head.

“Thank you kindly,” he said, “but I’ll do my own washing.”

“I don’t care whose washing you do,” Pa muttered, turning back to his game of cards, the cigarette hanging from his mouth like a row of teeth coming out, “so long as you do the work.”

“I ain’t ever gotten paid for sitting on my ass doin’ nothin’,” the feller told him, “and I ain’t plannin’ on startin’ now.”

“Come and I’ll show you where you’ll sleep,” Ma said quickly to that, maybe to keep Pa from speaking out about the cussing.

She guided Levi back out of the house and Erwin walked out with them to get away from Pa and his sullenness. He couldn’t help but notice how much shorter Levi was than even his Ma. On top of that, Erwin hadn’t ever seen anyone working on the farm who didn’t need to bend their head to make it through the small door to the guest place. When Ma walked out after a few minutes, Erwin got a strange urge to sneak up to the small window and look inside to see what this feller Levi was doing. Had he laid himself down on the bed? Had he gotten right to emptying that army bag into the small chest of drawers? But when Ma walked up to the porch, Erwin acted like he wasn’t looking.

“You drivin’ back up to the church today?” she asked Erwin and smiled when he nodded. “I’ll bake a little somethin’ for the minister. Ask me for it before you leave.”

“Sure thing, Ma,” Erwin replied, casting one last glance toward the guest place before he went back inside.

It was a couple hours before dinner when Erwin got back onto his pickup and drove off, heading townways for a couple miles before taking a right onto the church road. He’d done the trip near every week ever since he was too old for Sunday school. Before he’d saved up enough money for the truck he’d sometimes driven the old car, sometimes rode the distance if Pa had needed it himself. He could still smell the fresh biscuits that sat in a neat little basket on the passenger seat under a linen napkin when he drove through the sparse cemetery with its headstones leaning this way and that along with the iron fencing. He parked not far from the entrance, nearly forgetting the biscuits there was so much on his mind. The minister was waiting by the steps, wearing a wide-brimmed hat and a wide smile.

Some folk said Erwin looked more like the minister than he did like his old man, but Erwin didn’t listen to that kinda talk and was likely to stray from his ways to throw a good punch at anyone he heard saying it. To Erwin himself if there were similarities they were superficial: a curve of the nose, the color of his hair that matched the minister’s but not Pa’s. But the minister wore small round glasses, and Erwin’s eyes had always been sharper than most folk’s, so there was that to speak against it, if anything had to be said to it. Besides it was true they were related – Erwin’s Pa being some kinda distant cousin of the minister’s, and both being named Smith – and to Erwin that explained it all anyhow.

It was the minister first told Erwin he oughta make use of his mind and go to college somewhere – and he’d talked Pa into letting Erwin finish high school when his knee started acting up and the work on the ranch started shifting onto Erwin’s plate. Guess he’d seen how badly Erwin wanted to learn, how much he hungered for it. Maybe he thought Erwin oughta make a minister of himself one day, though he’d never said it or even implied it. However it was, every Sunday Erwin made the trip to sit with the man and talk, to borrow books that he read nearly keeling over after a day’s work on the ranch. At the start of it Erwin had thought the minister’d only have books on the church and them writings of John Wesley, but it turned out he read more widely than that – and Erwin guessed not many people knew it.

Once they’d sat down and the minister’d sent his thanks to Ma over the biscuits, Erwin mentioned the new ranch hand. Guess it wasn’t unusual he should’ve thought about it first. Nothing much new ever happened on the ranch.

“I must’ve heard someone mention it,” the minister said in his soft voice that had always reminded Erwin of his Ma somehow. “I don’t recall seeing anyone new at the service this morning.”

“I got a sense off him he’s not the church-going type,” Erwin replied. “He’s got a mouth on him something awful and Pa’s not very happy about it.”

“No, I don’t imagine he would be,” the minister said, laughing a little. And that was why Erwin liked him. He wasn’t so serious as Pa even about things such as this. He had that real Christian charity and love for his neighbours. But Pa’d been a Baptist before he’d married, which maybe explained the difference.

They moved quickly onto other things, onto the book Erwin had last borrowed off the minister’s collection though he’d not yet had a chance to finish it. It was a history book and those Erwin loved the most. There felt to be such truth in them, in how they spoke about things and what they really were like. Over on the ranch, in this here little corner of the world, there wasn’t much left over for pondering. But out there, over the great expanses of oceans, there were more things to learn that anyone could fill their head with if they had a thousand years to do it. Them books brought it closer, even if it sometimes hurt to think he wouldn’t never get to see them things for himself.

“Well, I best be getting home else my dinner get cold,” Erwin finally said like always, getting up and shaking the minister’s hand. “I’ll be by again next week if that’s alright?”

“Haven’t I told you you don’t need to keep asking that?” the minister said, laughing again when Erwin scratched the back of his head. “Hope you’ll be able to finish that book. And don’t forget to think for yourself on it. Don’t never just take something as gospel without thinking on it first.”

“Not even the Bible?”

The minister looked thoughtful for a second or two before he said, “God gave you the gift of reason so you could understand his word. There’s no understanding something if you don’t first think about it. I don’t think he’d want you to squander a gift like that rather than make the most of it.”

Erwin rolled the words over in his mind and nodded, seeing the sense in them. “Next week then,” he said, only putting on his hat once he was out on the church steps.

He saw the feller as soon as he stepped out of the car back on the ranch. He’d dragged a tub of water onto the grass in front of the guest place and was washing his clothes on an old washing board. Ma had a washing machine, a wooden thing that must’ve been near twenty years old, and Erwin couldn’t quite fathom why the feller would be using a board instead. Maybe he was just peculiar that way – it was a reasonable thought, since he seemed peculiar in many a way, did this here feller. He nodded at Erwin when he walked past, arms bulging when he rubbed a stain on a white undershirt like it was gonna save his life one day. Erwin nodded back, not sure if the feller even noticed. 


	2. Chapter 2

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> So I guess I got this done pretty fast. Hopefully the others will be as quick and fun to write!

Erwin couldn’t remember a day when hadn’t been woken at half past four by the old alarm clock that rattled and screeched like something on its deathbed. He was near sure he’d never slept past five even when he was sick and fevered. So on that day – like every other day – Erwin got up and dressed, shaved and washed his face and walked downstairs into the kitchen for his breakfast. Just like every morning, Ma and Pa were both already there, both already having their oatmeal and eggs and sausages with black coffee fresh out the pot. Erwin sat down and Ma fixed him a plate, passing her hand on his neck and humming a little to herself.

“You workin’ on the fence with Big Mike today?” Pa asked him and he shook his head, emptying his mouth before speaking.

“I think that’s gotta wait till tomorrow,” he said, taking a hasty sip of his coffee, near burning his tongue. “Gotta switch the cows over to Paisley field. Oughta take all day.”

Pa grunted and nodded, glancing behind himself when the kitchen door swung open quietly across the room. The stranger was all ready and dressed in a pair of worn but neat Wranglers and a blue shirt, his face shaven and scrubbed clean, the ends of that black hair still wet. He nodded at all of them without saying a word, accepted Ma’s breakfast trey with a mutter of thank you and got out the same way he’d come in. He came back a swift ten minutes later with the dishes, and by then Erwin was done with his meal too.

They walked out to the stables side by side. The sun was only starting to rise, the dew on the grass made the leather on their boots look brand new. There was a smell of freshness all over – Erwin’s favorite time of day.

“Gonna be driving the cattle today,” he told Levi on the way. “We got three pastures, gotta move them over past the river. Starting tomorrow we gotta get to fixin’ the fence on the third one. Can’t near let them on there, had a lot of snow damage durin’ the winter.”

“Nothin’ I ain’t done before,” Levi muttered, marching straight-backed and kinda stiff alongside Erwin, taking long strides. “You grow your own hay ‘round here?”

“Sure do,” Erwin told him, “but Pa mostly takes care of that. We got a cutter, a raker and a baler, and his leg don’t mind the drivin’. Our conveyer belt went bust a couple years back and we ain’t had the chance to fix it, so you and I’ll need to get them bales up to the new barn by hand once they’re done.”

“Round bales or square?”

“Round,” Erwin said, lifting the heavy boom off the stable door. “So that helps some. But it’s still hard on your back.”

Levi grunted, walking into the stable ahead of Erwin. They got the horses saddled quickly, Erwin taking Sawyer, the gelding he usually rode, and Levi the chestnut mare, Millie – both good working horses with years of experience and high startle-points, and Erwin didn’t expect any trouble. He kept an eye on Levi as he patted the horse on her neck, saying something to her under his breath. It sounded to Erwin like he was getting to know her, and she neighed softly like in a kinda response.

“Need a leg up?” Erwin asked Levi when he saw how high he’d had to lift the stirrups. He sure had short legs.

Levi clicked his tongue at Erwin, something almost vicious-feeling about it, like he was warning Erwin never to offer him help again. He got his foot in the stirrup, his knee coming up to his chin, and hoisted himself up to the saddle. Erwin had wondered if he’d look any taller riding, but the size of the horse just made him look even smaller.

“Best get goin’ then,” Erwin muttered to Sawyer, getting up on the saddle too.

They rode out along the edge of the hay field, the tall-growing alfalfa near brushing the soles of their boots. They scared a couple birds out of the brush along the way. Erwin watched their panicked flight and felt a sting of guilt for it. It was the only thing that broke the peace of the early morning that was crowned by the spotless blue of the sky. Behind them the purple hues started bleeding into it above the golden horizon – as perfect a day as there ever was, thought Erwin.

But his eyes were more fixed on something on the ground. There was a real cowboy way to Levi’s riding, an easy posture and a one-handed hold on the reins, soft commands that Millie followed as quick as if Levi’d been riding her for years. He looked more natural riding than walking, like in his life he’d done less of the latter than the former. Maybe it was that on horseback no one had an advantage over him. A short man could be as good a rider as anyone else, even better than most if he put his mind to it. Not quite born in the saddle, but Levi’d honed his skill alright, and Erwin wondered if the man could take him in a race.

“You say you grown up on a ranch?” Erwin asked him after a long silence.

Levi nodded and spat in the grass. “Up over on my uncle’s place,” he said, his voice still morning-gruff and lower for it. “Had a cow and calf operation, just like you folks do. But that dusty old pile of shit was mortgaged up to the fuckin’ danglers before my uncle’d even started. In the end could only hold off so long.”

Erwin nodded and grunted a bit of sympathy he wasn’t sure Levi heard. It wasn’t an uncommon sorta story, though Erwin didn’t never hear one and not feel a sting in his heart. He thought about all those abandoned near-to-crumble ranches out across the south and Midwest and it felt like something dying, but Erwin wasn’t sure what.

They got to the cows and started riding around them, looking them over to see if any of the hundred-head cattle had gotten itself hurt. All was well, and they started driving the animals across the field toward the gate on the far side. It was a big job even for two people, but Levi’d sure been right when he said he’d done it before. No sooner had one of the cows taken its calf and started wandering off than Levi rode over to shout and whistle them back into line. They both knew the work so well that hardly needed to say a thing through all of it.

To get over to Paisley field they needed to cross a river and though over in those parts it ran shallow and meandering, it was still the toughest part of the drive. One of the calves – a late-born runt of a thing they’d have a hard time selling come August – refused to walk into the water no matter how close to it Erwin rode. In the end there was nothing else to be done about it than to rope the poor thing. Levi did that too, catching the calf’s legs and tying them up while its mother cried at them something awful. He hoisted the little one up onto the saddle and climbed behind it, carrying it over and patting its head, muttering sweet nothings to it against the sound of the river. By the time he’d let the calf run back to its mama, they both had to get busy bringing the herd back together again. There were no more incidents between the river and Paisley field.

Once they’d gotten the cows all settled and the gate secured, there was the matter of drawing up water for them to drink. The other pastures had streams running through them – but not Paisley, and it had been a cheap bit of land for the very thing. They’d put up long troughs in a couple places over the field, but the water had to be drawn up from a well near the gate and hauled around on an old milk cart Pa’d bought off an auction some time back. While Erwin got old Millie fixed up in front of the wagon, Levi started pumping the water into buckets and carrying them over. Erwin kept an eye on him. It was an easy thing to notice that Levi was no stranger to hard work just like he’d said. Seemed to Erwin like he more than made up for the length of his limbs with what they were made of, and the longer they were at it the more Erwin was sure he’d never seen someone who’d so stubbornly refused to slow down or take up a lighter task to give himself a break. To cool himself down, Levi took off the bandanna he wore around his neck and dipped it into a bucket, wrapping it back around himself and wetting the tips of his hair. Erwin could see his summer would be easier this year than many that’d come before.

They stopped to rest after they’d filled the troughs, letting the horses feed themselves on the new grass around the tree they were sitting under. The sun was high up by then and burning. Next to Erwin Levi was drinking water from a flask, leaning against the tree. He’d thrown off his hat and stretched out his legs. Erwin could see his Wranglers had been mended most likely half a dozen times.

“Whereabouts was it?” Erwin thought to ask. “Your uncle’s ranch.”

“Back up in Wyoming.”

“That where you’re from?” Erwin asked next, catching Levi’s nod from the corner of his eye.

“Lived over in Dubois with my mama to start with,” he said, stopping to drink. “Wasn’t nobody in that town didn’t know it was the sheriff done knocked her up though he had a wife and four kids already. Still remember gettin’ those looks from folks around town, like somehow it was all me and my mama’s fault.”

Erwin didn’t know what to say, so he just muttered, “Well that ain’t right.”

“I was ‘bout six when she passed. Went to live with my uncle then,” Levi continued like not hearing Erwin’s words, or just not caring about them. “Once the ranch was done with I started goin’ around, workin’ wherever had work.”

“Condolences,” Erwin said, “’bout your Ma.”

Levi was quiet for a long while before saying, “Now I don’t tell all that to just anybody. Just reckoned there’s no harm since I ain’t plannin’ on stayin’ here, and I ain’t plannin’ on comin’ back neither.”

“Sure thing,” Erwin said to that and quit trying to steal side-eye glances at Levi, turning to the sky instead. He wondered where Levi was moving on to next, but didn’t have the guts to ask.

“You been here your whole life?” Levi asked him instead and Erwin nodded. “Guess when things’re good there ain’t no reason to leave.”

“We count our blessings,” Erwin agreed, expecting some kinda sneer from Levi but hearing nothing. “Pa’s done a good job taking care of the place.”

“He’s one tough old son-of-a-bitch,” Levi said. “Got the feelin’ he didn’t like the look of me too much.”

“I told you,” Erwin reminded him, “he don’t like people cussing under his roof – and he don’t like people talkin’ back to him neither. That thing you said about him knowin’ the Bible? You sure found every way to get off his good side right on that first meetin’.”

Levi snorted. “Well I don’t keep myself up at night thinkin’ ‘bout what your daddy thinks of me,” he said. “Like I said, I ain’t plannin’ on comin’ back here. He could see me as the devil for all I care.”

Later that night, after he’d had his supper and done his praying, Erwin lay in his bed and thought about what Levi’s life must’ve been like. He wondered how it felt to be on the move, to always be looking for that next roof to sleep under, the next chance to fill your belly, the next bit of money you could come by. He wondered if winters up in Wyoming were a bad time to be living like that. He tried to imagine that rootlessness but found it difficult on account of never having felt it for himself. Must’ve been an exciting thing if a little frightening too. He wondered where Levi was going to next – maybe somewhere northways, following the ripening of the crops. In the end he even wondered whether he wasn’t thinking too much about Levi and his comings and goings.

Erwin thought about the things Levi must’ve seen on his travels. Perhaps he’d been all the way south and seen the border to Mexico. He must’ve met a lot of people from all walks of life and heard their stories. Erwin wondered if Levi’d seen the ocean. These were the things Erwin could envy Levi for, the things that spelled freedom. Not that Erwin felt trapped on the ranch – not too often anyhow. But there had to be something to being able to just pack up your things and leave, feeling no obligation to anyone but yourself. Being able to choose the full path of your life relying on your own tastes and reason. Yes, there had to be something to that.

The next day started just like the one before. They rode out to check on the cattle before starting on fixing the fence. Big Mike rode over to give them a hand, introducing himself to Levi with a quick handshake.

“Sure can see where you got your name,” Levi muttered, fixing his hat to better shield himself from the sun.

“They don’t call you Little Levi then?” Mike asked, looking down at Levi who spat in the grass.

“I’ll give you that one,” he replied and stepped forward. “But say that again and I’ll bust your jaw.”

“Fair enough,” Mike replied.

From then on the two got along just fine and fixing the fence went faster for it. They quickly found a rhythm for the work and made good time. Erwin could see Pa out in the Ford going over the fields, the hay coming down row after row. A little past noon another figure appeared on the horizon, on the Zacharius’ side of the field. Nan rode over carrying a big basket of lunch, handing it down to Big Mike without ever getting off the saddle. The only one who had to be talked into taking a break was Levi.

“You come and help us fix the fence, Nan?” Erwin asked her, but she shook her head.

“Gotta go help Doris with the hogs,” she replied, already turning the horse around. “Don’t leave the basket lyin’ out here again.”

“Try not to,” Mike told her, nodding when she did, and she was off. In the couple years the two’d been married, Erwin hadn’t never seen them kiss.

“Everything good with Nan?” Erwin asked Mike who nodded with a half smile.

“Mama’s stopped pesterin’ her ‘bout the roundbelly business,” the man said. “Last week when mama was at it again, Nan told her straight up if she wanted them babies by me so bad she could have ‘em her own damn self. You can guess that shut her up pretty quick.”

Behind them Levi snorted out a laugh, but didn’t say a thing.

They got the fence fixed and the cows driven onto the pasture by the week’s end, and Erwin thought they’d made good time on it too. At the dinner table he told Ma and Pa all about what a hard worker Levi was, expecting Pa to be pleased to hear it, but if anything it made him grow sourer than he’d been before. Still, on Saturday when Levi asked if he could have the evening off to go up to town once all the work was done, Pa gave his permission, though he gave a good lecture about idleness and gambling and the dangers of the drink as well as a reminder of the service the following morning.

Erwin drove Levi up to town. He’d changed out of his usual work shirts into one so clean white Erwin couldn’t quite fathom how he’d managed it, living on the road as he did. He wore an old-timey looking cravat with it too. Erwin wanted to say something about it, how the man’d gotten all dolled up like that, but he thought it best to keep his mouth shut. Levi told him he’d hitch a ride back somehow and not to worry about picking him up, standing his ground even when Erwin pointed out that near nobody lived around that neck of the woods but them and the Zachariuses. So Erwin rode back by himself, watching Levi from the rear view mirror as he headed toward the bar.

Back on the ranch he fell asleep for a few hours, exhausted by the hard day’s work. But something pulled him out of it about an hour after midnight and he walked to the window. No light was on at the guest place window and when Erwin went down and knocked on the door, there was no answer. He looked at his watch and back at the house, then knocked on the door one more time before peering in. No one in the room – just a spotless floor and a bed so tidily made it would’ve put army bunks to shame. Erwin closed the door, scratched the back of his head for a few seconds before jumping into the truck. He saw a light turning on in Ma and Pa’s window when he pulled onto the road.

He was two thirds of the way to town when he found Levi walking ranchways along the side of the road. He turned the pickup around and slowed down to a stop. Levi climbed in without invitation and without saying a thing. He smelled of alcohol and had clearly gotten himself into trouble, judging by the cut on his cheek and the bruise starting to form around his left eye.

“Pa’s not gonna like this,” Erwin muttered, wincing a little when Levi laughed.

“Trust me, I ain’t so thrilled about it neither,” he said, leaning against the seat of the car and tipping his hat over his swollen face.

They didn’t speak for the rest of the drive. When they got back to the ranch, the house was again dark and it stayed that way even after they’d slammed the door of the pickup shut. Levi limped a little when he walked from the car to the guest place, refusing the help Erwin offered. While Levi sat himself down on the bed, Erwin ran to the well and pumped some cool water into a bucket, dipping a cloth into it and handing it to Levi. He slapped it onto his eye and laughed quietly, and that’s how Erwin knew he was still more than a little drunk.

“Who’d you get into a fight with?” Erwin asked him, sitting down on the edge of the small bed.

Levi shrugged. “Didn’t stop to ask for their names,” he said, pulling off the necktie and unbuttoning his shirt. “Gotta get it to soak. One of ‘em got his blood on it.”

He dropped the shirt into the bucket of cold water and Erwin frowned.

“How many guys were you fightin’?” he asked and Levi laughed again.

“Four to start with,” he said, “but it turned into three real quick.”

Erwin shook his head. “Goes beyond my understandin’,” he muttered, glancing up at Levi when he snorted and groaned.

“You don’t even know what it was about,” he argued, but when Erwin asked him to explain it he refused. “Just get you upset. Best you don’t know.”

Erwin might have guessed from that what’d been said at the bar – after a bit of liquor, everyone was a gossip, Erwin knew that much.

“You ever been drunk?”

Erwin looked up at Levi. “Sure I have,” he said, remembering the time, how he’d told Marie he loved her and not remembered it the next day. “Didn’t see what’s so special ‘bout it. Just gets you into trouble if you ask me.”

“What’s wrong with a bit of trouble?” Levi asked next, and Erwin expected to see him grinning like someone half out of his mind. Instead he looked dead serious.

Erwin shrugged. “Just don’t get why you’d wanna make your life harder than it has to be,” he said.

For a moment Levi didn’t say anything to it, just took the wet rag off his eye and dropped it into the bucket with the shirt. Erwin wasn’t looking at him, but he could feel him staring, like pinpricks on his skin. Suddenly the air in the room seemed a little harder to breathe, though Erwin couldn’t say why.

“You ever get laid?”

And then he couldn’t have said why he wasn’t surprised to hear Levi ask him that.

“Well I ain’t married,” Erwin told him, “and I sure don’t wanna get no girl into trouble.”

Another couple of seconds of silence and then Levi said, “Lots of ways to do it without gettin’ anyone into trouble.”

Erwin had a hard time figuring out why he suddenly felt hot, why he felt like a pool of lava had settled in his guts. It spread quickly downwards when he met Levi’s gaze, near flinching at how dark his eyes had gotten, and how quick his breathing. Suddenly the small room seemed full of summer thunder, of pressure and heat and lighting waiting to strike.

“Want me to show you how?”

Erwin never answered, but when Levi pulled him back to lean against the wall, he didn’t fight it neither. Levi’s hands were tough and bony, his touch as sure with Erwin as it’d been with old Millie. His breath smelled like hard liquor when he leaned in, grabbing Erwin’s dick through his jeans, running his palm up and down it in a way that had Erwin arching his back to get closer. Levi unbuttoned his fly quickly, pulling him out but stopping suddenly to rummage in the drawers. Erwin couldn’t see what he was doing, but when his fist closed around him again, it was slicker than it had been.

With his left hand, Levi unfastened his own jeans and pulled them down just past his buttocks. Erwin caught a glimpse of Levi’s hard-on before he straddled Erwin, pushing down onto him with a half-smothered grunt of either pain or pleasure. And Erwin, who’d never known what he wanted when it came to things like this, had never been surer of anything in his life. His hands grabbed a hold of Levi’s rear as he bucked upwards with his hips, once, twice, then it was all over in a head-spinning flash of lighting that made his breath leave his body. He’d never known anything could feel so good. He’d never known anything could feel so right.

Neither one of them moved. Levi’s head was heavy on Erwin’s shoulder, his breathing loud and panting in his ear. Then Levi groaned again.

“Jesus H., Smith,” he whispered. “Wish you’d’ve told me this was gonna be the goddamn rodeo.”

He got off Erwin, hissing a swear, passing him the wet rag from the bucket to clean himself with. He did a bad job of the washing up, his hands growing number by the second. When he’d finally gotten out of the guest place and back into his bedroom they were shaking and he felt sick, his shame burning his body like a fever. He didn’t want to believe he’d wanted that. He didn’t want to believe it was what he’d always wanted.

He managed a couple restless winks, got up before the alarm clock started its rattling, dressed quickly and had a horse saddled and ready before Ma even started on breakfast. He headed out to the pasture to check on the cows, hoping the cool air and the riding would sort his thoughts out for him. But there was unrest in the cattle, and he found the cause quickly enough. The runt of a calf Levi had carried across the river was lying dead in the grass, open from throat to haunches. It felt like a sign of something, though Erwin couldn’t say exactly of what. He told Pa about it over breakfast. He guessed it was coyotes done it. There was no sign of Levi, the breakfast tray already emptied, and Erwin was a little relieved to have missed him.

It was when he was changing into his church clothes that the dread really nestled into Erwin’s gut, the thought of sitting in the house of the Lord, listening to the minister with the weight of his sins now suddenly grown worse than ever before. His fingers fumbled with his bolo tie, he could barely comb his hair into place. When he walked out of the house and caught Levi waiting by the pickup, Erwin tried not to look at him but couldn’t help stealing glances. He looked even less at ease as Erwin felt. He was wearing the same cravat and shirt from the night before, and Erwin could see the latter was still damp, like he’d hung it up to dry after that thing that’d happened.

When Pa saw Levi’s face with its bruises and dark circles under the eyes, he looked about ready to cuss on a Sunday himself. Once they got to the church he grabbed Levi by the arm and guided him to the backrow. Erwin could hear him muttering something about embarrassment and ungodliness. He soon spotted who Levi had been fighting with. Flagon Turret and a couple others were sitting with their heads bent, fiddling with their hats and to Erwin they all looked like they’d gotten the rougher end of that punch-up.

When the minister started his sermon, Erwin half expected his guilt to start crushing him, or for some hellfire to eat up the whole of the church, the righteous along with himself and the rest of the sinners. He listened to the talk of Jesus’ charitable nature absently, waiting for the retribution, waiting to feel something, to hear Satan whispering in his ear. But he felt nothing and everything was the same as always. Erwin looked at the minister and didn’t know what to think.

On the drive back to the ranch, the breakfast that seemed to have been sitting uneasily in Levi’s stomach even before decided to sit even worse. They were a couple miles from the church when he ordered Pa to stop the car and jumped out, retching loudly by the side of the road, and Erwin wondered if Levi’d been more drunk the night before than he’d realized.

“You may not be the worst ranch hand I ever hired,” Pa told Levi when he climbed back into the car, “but you sure as hell are the God dee worst sorta good-for-nothing.”

Levi didn’t reply, only leaned back and tilted his hat over his face.

For the rest of the day Erwin tried to make himself busier than he had to be to stop thinking about things, and about Levi above else, since thinking about Levi made that heat rush right back to the pit of his stomach, and near forced him off the horse and into the trees. He’d never felt so badly torn, couldn’t make heads or tails of what he was supposed to think. Knowing that he couldn’t keep something like that from the minister, who always had a way of seeing straight through him, Erwin decided not to go, rude as it was. Though a part of him wanted to curse Levi to heck, he took the chance of having a word with him in private, carrying his dinner tray to the guest place. By then he’d made up his mind someway, though the decision still burned him when he announced it to Levi: that what happened oughta never have happened, and he’d make sure it wouldn’t again.

“I ain’t never made you do nothing you didn’t want to do,” Levi told him, eating his stew, “and I ain’t gonna.”

Erwin left him to eat by himself, thinking the matter was now as done as it could be. At night he nearly forgot to say his prayers, and he had to climb back out of bed to do it. He thought he’d feel guilty, but he didn’t. He thought the words would mean more now, but they didn’t. And as soon as he closed his eyes, all he could see was Levi.


	3. Chapter 3

Erwin was able to hold off until Tuesday before jumping into his pickup and driving over to the church, and even then he couldn’t say his thoughts were in any better shape than they had been on Sunday. He kept trying to sort them out while he drove, so lost in them that he almost ran over a line of ducklings that were trying to cross the road to their mama. He had to brake so hard he hit his forehead on the edge of the steering wheel.

Erwin spotted the minister from the road. He was walking around the empty churchyard with someone, stopping when he spotted Erwin’s truck heading their way. Erwin wasn’t pleased to see the minister looking a little worried when he walked up to him, tipping his hat to the stranger, a man near Old Man Zackarius’ age with a balding head and couple more wrinkles on his face than even Old Man, especially on the forehead and between the eyes.

“Erwin, I’d like to introduce you to Reverend Nick, who’s here visiting us from another parish,” the minister said and Erwin extended his hand to shake the old man’s. “Erwin’s one of our best and brightest.”

Erwin could feel his shame burning his face while Reverend Nick nodded, still just as serious as he’d been before when he said, “I look forward to hearing more from you at the church social on Sunday.”

“Sure enough,” Erwin muttered, fixing the hat on his head and turning back to the minister. “I was wondering if–”

“Yes, of course,” the minister agreed before he’d finished the sentence, turning to the reverend. “I hope you’ll excuse me. Erwin and I have a habit of meeting up once or twice a week to discuss some topics of the day.”

“Cultivating young minds is perhaps our most important duty,” he said. “I don’t mind at all. I’d best be gettin’ to my own contemplations anyhow.”

Erwin’d barely had time for a rush of relief, following the minister into the church, when the nerves caught him by his throat again and he sat down in the man’s study. The minister fixed him with a concerned stare.

“You didn’t come by on Sunday,” he said, almost like asking a question.

“I’m awful sorry about that,” Erwin told him, for a second meeting those eyes that were near as blue as his. “I was busy.”

“I understand,” the minister said, smiling. “I know how hard you work at the–”

“I’m sorry,” Erwin interrupted him, just had to, he couldn’t help himself. “I wasn’t busy. That was a lie. I’m sorry.”

The minister looked surprised, confused even. “But… It’s not like you to lie. Is it, Erwin?”

“No, it is not,” he said, the words feeling too much like Sunday school on his tongue. “I couldn’t come on Sunday ‘cause… Well, I guess there was just too much on my mind that day.”

“How so?” the minister asked and Erwin wished he could say what it really was about. He couldn’t remember ever having felt like he couldn’t tell the man something.

“What I was mainly wondering on Sunday…” he started, looking for the words. “I guess I was asking myself what it means when someone does something wrong and don’t feel guilty about it afterwards.”

For a moment Erwin feared the minister would ask him what he’d done wrong – and there was something of that question in his eyes when he looked at Erwin. In the end he never did.

“Well,” he started, fixing the glasses on his nose and crossing his hands, “in my experience there are only two reasons for something like that happening. The first is that whoever did it has no conscience and therefore doesn’t feel the guilt that should come after it.”

Erwin could feel a drop of sweat sliding down his neck.

“The second reason is,” the minister went on, “that whatever this person did wasn’t actually wrong after all, and the absence of guilt proves it.”

“But,” Erwin started, “if it’s something the Bible says is wrong, don’t that mean it must be wrong, no matter how you feel about it?”

The minister fell quiet again for a moment, staring at Erwin like he didn’t hardly see him. He then lay his hand on the old leather Bible that sat on his desk, smoothing its surface, like deep in thought. When he looked back up at Erwin, there was hesitation in his eyes.

“Erwin,” he said, quieter than before. “Do you believe that everything the Bible says is the absolute truth?”

Erwin thought about the question and thought about Scripture, how he’d always thought some of them things in it didn’t make a whole lot of sense once you started looking at it different. He’d tried not to, honest to God he had. But like Pa had said more often than once, it was a good thing it was this minister and not some other done teach Erwin in Sunday school, since his questions would’ve made a less patient man snap his fingers in two with the pointer. But Erwin’d never thought the minister’s patience could be caused by him having asked himself the same things.

“I struggle…” the minister started, turning to look at the Bible again, almost sad now. “There are some parts of it I struggle with myself.”

“What sorta things?” Erwin asked, frowning at the wistful smile the minister gave him.

“When I was growing up, my parents used to say I’d make a better scientist than a minister,” he said, laughing quietly. “Did I ever tell you that? Suppose it was on account of me not really wanting to believe things that I couldn’t see or hear or touch. And even now when I read the Bible, when I read about the miraculous deeds of our Lord Jesus Christ, there’s a part of me that thinks, ‘Well, I ain’t ever seen anybody bring back the dead, and I’m pretty sure it can’t be done’. I don’t doubt that I’ll always be thinking that.”

Erwin did a poor job of trying to hide his surprise. The minister laughed at that.

“I know,” he said. “It must be strange hearing this from someone like me. But I’m thinking… Maybe this question of right and wrong you keep asking yourself isn’t all that different from what I struggle with.”

“How do you mean?”

“I just think maybe you have trouble believing everything could be that black and white,” the minister said, “just like I have trouble believing things that go beyond my reason.”

“Well…” Erwin started and then it was like flood gates being shattered. “I gotta admit I have sometimes thought about that when we’ve talked about thinking about things for yourself and how readin’ history books you gotta be mindful of how things were different back in the day and how people thought differently of things. Like how the Romans didn’t feel bad for not being Christians since they had their own way of thinking and their own gods to worship. And I’ve thought about how… Well, I hope you don’t mind me saying this but sometimes when I pick up the Bible it feels like just a… book.”

The minister laughed at that. “Well, on its surface that is what it is,” he said. “Just paper and ink mostly, just like any other book. But the message within it, the message that God tried to share with all of us through his son Jesus… I’m sure you can agree that’s something special.”

“Yes,” Erwin said earnestly, frowning, “but even in that, Scripture feels to me to sometimes contradict itself. Like it’ll say ‘an eye for an eye’ but then go on to tell you to turn the other cheek. So it’s hard to know which way to feel about things sometimes if you rely just on that.”

“Well, we’ve talked about interpretation before,” the minister said, “and in that sense as well the Bible is much like any other book. Just the sheer number of different denominations proves that its message is subject to interpretation. We all have our own special way of reading it, and I could tell you what I think is the most important message, but it’d never mean much compared to what you feel in your heart are the key things for _your_ life.”

Erwin thought about that for a couple seconds. “So that’s what it all comes down to again,” he said. “To thinking about things for yourself, and not letting other people do your thinking for you.”

“Exactly,” the minister said, beaming at Erwin like he’d just made his whole week. “So maybe that’s how you oughta solve this problem of not feeling guilty. Maybe you oughta go to the Bible and read it for yourself, and try and find the reason that way.”

Erwin smiled through the nervous twinge in his gut. He didn’t need to go back to the good book to look at those lines, to know what it was called. He knew. He’d heard it named in a sermon here and there, though the minister didn’t seem to like talking about it much. Erwin himself hadn’t never given it a whole lot of thought either until now, nothing past growing up knowing it was something you oughtn’t do. But maybe there was something that contradicted that as well, something he hadn’t thought to think about before.

“What _do_ you think is the most important thing in the Bible?” he asked the minister just to calm some of that unrest inside him.

The man smiled again. “I want to believe there is a greater truth to be found in the word of God,” he said. “An explanation to why things are the way they are, and to how things ought to be. I believe the message of love and hope and acceptance that God shows us through the life of his son is that truth and our guide to how we ought to live here with each other.”

Erwin didn’t know if he was pleased or worried about the minister’s views lining up so well with his own. It was hard to tell if they just happened to agree on this, or whether he’d done a poor job of thinking about things for himself all this time. But when he told the minister he agreed with him on that, the man didn’t seem bothered by it and that eased his mind some.

“You’ve got a good head on your shoulders,” he told Erwin like he’d done so many times before. “There’s nothing you can’t do once you put your mind to it. Remember that. And try not to worry so much. You’ve grown up to be a good man – though I might be biased in that opinion.”

“Thank you, minister,” Erwin said, feeling pleased and a little relieved, like he did most times he came to talk to the man.

“I feel like I should be thanking you,” the minister said and laughed. “You’ve given me so much to think about, I think I’ll need to rewrite the whole sermon – but at least I’ve got two weeks to do it.”

“How come two weeks?”

“Reverend Nick has kindly offered to deliver the sermon on Sunday,” the minister explained, hesitating for a moment before saying, “Can I trust you with a secret, Erwin?”

“Of course,” Erwin told him at once.

“The reverend isn’t just visiting,” he said. “They’re thinking about moving him to this parish.”

“Where would you go?” Erwin asked, frowning when he saw the sudden embarrassment on the minister’s face.

“I’ve been thinking about leaving,” he told Erwin quietly, fixing him with a quick and wistful stare before turning his eyes away, “and doing some missionary work for a few years.”

Erwin waited for a moment longer for the minister to continue, but when he didn’t he said, “Well… I’m sure we’d all miss you if you left. I know I would.”

“Thank you, Erwin,” the minister said and there was a look on his face Erwin didn’t recognise, a feeling he’d never felt himself and therefore couldn’t name. “I’m sure I’ll miss you too. I suppose you’ve not given more thought to leaving yourself? Applying to colleges somewhere?”

“Well…” Erwin started. “Like I’ve said before, there’s not really a way I could just leave. I’ll need to take care of the ranch once Ma and Pa gets too old to – and that ain’t too many years off neither, if Pa’s leg keeps gettin’ worse.”

The minister nodded but like all those times before, he looked as though there was something he wanted to say about that and just like all those other times, in the end he never did. Erwin had always wondered about that, what those words would be if the man would say them. He’d suspected they’d be about Erwin having to think about his future, how them ranches were dying all over and how he’d be better off finding something else, something that challenged his mind in a way that ranch work never could. He’d also suspected the man had never said none of this because he felt like he’d be putting ideas into Erwin’s head that way and with all their other conversations, Erwin knew he didn’t want to do that.

They talked for a little while longer about this and that, but the minister never asked Erwin what he was feeling so guilty about, and Erwin never said nothing about it neither. Back at the ranch he spent a good hour reading the Bible before he had to go out to make sure the cattle was alright and afterwards he thought he’d made some new sense of the whole thing. He’d read through Leviticus again and found a good dozen other things it said that folk in those parts didn’t pay no mind to, about eating pork and all those things. And Erwin thought it wasn’t nearly as bad to sin with another man as it was for them folks to want to kill them people who did, since it clearly said “thou shalt not kill” in the commandments, but nothing direct about man sleeping with another man. It seemed to him some people had just got their priorities mixed up somewhere along the way, and he wondered why that was.

When he rode back to the ranch with Levi that evening, Erwin stopped him on the way by the hay fields to tell him he wasn’t harbouring no hard feelings about what happened and that he didn’t think less of Levi for it neither. The other man nodded, fixed the black hat on his head and got ready to ride on.

“But like I said,” Erwin added just to be clear, “I don’t think it oughta happen again between us.”

“And like I said,” Levi countered, frowning, “I ain’t gonna force you to do nothin’ you don’t want.”

Erwin stayed quiet for a little while before muttering, “Well… I’m not sayin’ I don’t _want_ it. I’m just sayin’ it oughtn’t happen again.”

“Makes little difference to me,” Levi told him, pulling the reins on old Millie who was anxious to get home. “You don’t plan on doin’ it, I ain’t plannin’ on forcing your hand. It’s the same end result no matter what your reasons are for it.”

“So it don’t bother you none?” Erwin asked him when he suddenly found the courage somewhere. “It don’t bother you that it’s a sin?”

Levi shrugged. “I can’t help the way I am,” he said, “and if I gotta choose between sinnin’ every once in a while and never doin’ what feels good and natural to me, I choose the sinnin’. The way I figure is that if there’s a God, he owes me for them ways he’s screwed me over. So no, I don’t feel bad for it. I refuse to.”

They stayed quiet for the rest of the ride back, but when he went to bed that night, Erwin thought about what Levi had said. He wondered if he’d been right, if he really was built like that from the start. Knowing how people like that were treated, it didn’t seem likely anyone would choose it and bring that upon themselves. Erwin wondered if he himself was built that way, but he didn’t think so, thinking of Marie and all them ways he’d thought about her, how some of them made him blush even now.

Of course choosing to be something and choosing to do something were different things, but when Erwin thought about it, thought about having to choose between always being alone and going against God every once in a while, he could see it wasn’t an easy choice to make, especially considering people like that must’ve known loneliness better than most, must’ve known how your body could ache for someone to touch it. Erwin wondered if Levi’d known that feeling like he himself had, whether he’d looked at people like Erwin’d looked at Nan and Big Mike, wishing so hard he could find something like it and that he wouldn’t end up like his Ma and Pa, who seemed to have little in common and little affection between them when it came down to it. He’d wanted that with Marie, he’d wanted it more than he’d ever wanted anything. It was one of the things he was most grateful for, that she and Nile decided to leave the ranch life behind and move away and though he knew they didn’t do it for his sake, he was glad he didn’t have to spend the rest of his life looking on their happiness.

The next morning Pa told Erwin it was gonna rain and that he and Levi oughta go out and get them bales into the barn first thing. So they rode over to the field right after checking up on the cattle, spending the better part of the day hauling and rolling the bales in through the doors and up the rise. There was thunder brewing, the air hung around them thick and heavy and made the task harder. Erwin kept pulling up the hem of his shirt to wipe his forehead on it and a couple of times he thought he caught Levi looking. It made him feel light-headed.

The first drops started falling just when they were getting the last of the bales up and the rain got pouring fast till it looked less like rain and more like a wall of water. Erwin checked the bales to make sure the rain hadn’t gotten through very far, then sat down on the floor next to them. Across the barn Levi was placing a bucket in one of the corners. When he walked away, Erwin could hear the metallic _drip drip drip_ of the rain falling through and into the bucket.

“You’ve got a leak,” Levi said, sitting down on the floor, throwing off his hat and wiping his neck with the bandanna.

“Yup,” Erwin replied gloomily. “Just another thing that needs fixin' I guess.”

Levi snorted a little at that. “You worry too much,” he said. “I seen places that are much worse off than this. One leak on a roof ain't gonna put any of you out of business. Besides, you and I can patch it up in a day or two.”

“I suppose,” Erwin said, taking off his hat too and leaning his head against the wall. “You worked on a lot of ranches?”

“Sure have,” Levi said, stretching out his short legs, resting the heel of his other boot on the toes of the other. “Up and down the Midwest, all the way south to Texas. I've worked on ranches, farms, cattle driving – hell, I can name more things I have done than those I haven't.”

“Pa said you done bronc bustin' too?”

“Back a couple years ago,” Levi said, “but that shit messes up your insides something bad. Quit the first time I started shittin' blood, decided I'd be better off findin' something else. Feel the same way 'bout rodeo. Don't ever get a job where nine times out of ten you're gonna end up dead before you hit forty.”

“You ever been to the ocean?” Erwin asked next, remembering he wondered about that not too long ago, and also more than a little to change the subject. He felt a little disappointed to see Levi shaking his head.

“Might do soon,” he still said. “Thinkin' 'bout headin' down to one of 'em cities by the west coast next.”

“Didn't tag you as a city person,” Erwin said, surprised.

“And I ain't,” Levi agreed, looking a little sour, “but I thought I might try my luck out there, see if I can make somethin' out of it, live different. Lord knows I ain't ever gonna get enough money together to buy my own fucking ranch out here, and there's bound to come a time when I'll get sick of workin' for these mean old sons of bitches. Thought I'd quit while I'm ahead some, find myself something else to do.”

“Ain't you gonna miss the country?” Erwin asked.

He'd thought about it a lot himself, how he'd grow homesick for the swaying of the alfalfa in the summer breeze, for the way the earth smelled after it rained, how if you climbed up to the roof, you could see miles and miles of farmland stretching out beyond the horizon. None of that in a city, and Erwin knew he'd ache for it.

“Most likely,” Levi admitted. “Up in Wyoming you'll be lucky to scrape enough of a livin' off the mountain side to feed yourself for two months out of twelve but fuck, if I could... I'd go right back there tomorrow, and walk if I had to.”

“Good country?”

“You never been?” Levi asked Erwin back and shook his head when he did. “The best bit of land I ever seen. After them mountains, I can't seem to get used to the flatness of everything down here.”

“Maybe I oughta go sometime,” Erwin though out loud, looking over at Levi. All this talking felt so easy now he could hardly believe there'd ever been any trouble between them.

“You don't ever think about that?” Levi asked him. “About goin' somewhere else?”

“Well...” Erwin started, rubbing the back of his head. “I suppose so. The minister's told me I oughta apply for college, get an education.”

“You wanna do that?”

“Well, I gotta stay here on the ranch, you know, take care of things once Ma and Pa can't,” Erwin replied, not understanding Levi's frown till he spoke again.

“That ain't what I asked,” he told Erwin.

“I only mean I can't very well do that,” Erwin made clearer, thinking Levi had missed something about his explanation, but Levi shook his head.

“I ain't asked you if you can, Erwin,” he said, sounding a little angry now. “I asked if you want to.”

“Well sure I want to,” Erwin replied, getting a bit upset himself. “Don't everybody want to go to school and learn all of them new things about the world? About... Other countries and the economy and... The God dee outer space. But ain't everybody got the chance to do that, Levi.”

Erwin stared at the man for the length of the heavy silence. He looked like he was biting his tongue not to say something, like he was dying to set Erwin straight about something he'd said. In the end he just sucked on his teeth a little and turned to look at the floor. Neither one of them had a whole lot to say after that. It bothered Erwin so much that he was still thinking about it sitting on the back porch after dinner, watching the ripples cutting through the tall grass.

“Hello, stranger.”

Erwin looked back at the sound and smiled. “Hi, Ma,” he said.

She walked over, drying her hands on a rag of an old towel and sitting down next to Erwin on the porch steps. They stayed quiet, like they often did, just sitting together and enjoying the company until Ma suddenly spoke up.

“Is there something on your mind, Erwin?” she asked and he nearly flinched at that, his guilt suddenly surging up again. “You've been awful in your thoughts lately. Is something wrong?”

“Not more than usual, Ma,” Erwin lied, glancing at her but turning away just as quick. “There's a leak on the barn roof. Levi and I oughta fix it before he goes.”

She agreed and they fell quiet again. Erwin spent a moment thinking back to his childhood, how whenever he'd gotten himself hurt on the ranch he had run to his Ma and she'd held him and kissed him and made it all better. Now Erwin couldn't remember when he stopped doing that, when the hurt he felt stopped being so much about getting splinters under his skin and stepping on old nails and more about Marie not loving him back and the wide world being all out there, always out of his reach.

“The minister ain't said nothing to you?” Ma asked then. “Something to make you think? Something 'bout college maybe?”

“He does mention it from time to time,” Erwin told her. “It don't bother me much when he does it.”

She nodded, looking out across the undulating alfalfa and Erwin knew what she was thinking. She thought he oughta go. She'd never said it, knowing how Pa felt about it, but Erwin knew. It was in those looks she gave him when he came back to the house in the evening after a hard day's work at the ranch, stretching his back like it was all ready to give out though he wasn't even in his mid-twenties.

“The minister did tell me,” Erwin started to move the subject over to something else, “that he'll be leavin' himself soon.”

“What?” Ma asked sounding more worried than Erwin'd heard her in a long time. “Why? Where to?”

“He said he's gonna do some missionary work,” Erwin said, only then realizing he wasn’t supposed to tell nobody, but knowing telling Ma was near the same thing. “Didn't say where. He's got another minister visiting, gonna give the sermon on Sunday.”

Ma didn't speak, like some hidden thought was holding her tongue for her. Her face grew first white and then red, like she was sad and then angry. She pressed her lips together and nodded, drew a deep breath and let it out slowly through her nostrils.

“Well then,” she said, standing up. “I'm sure the minister will do good work out there.”

She left Erwin alone with the swaying grass and the feelings that swayed even worse within him. He didn't wanna think about what had made Ma so angry. He didn't wanna think about anything much, not how good it felt to talk with Levi before, how even though they both got angry it was the most interesting talk he'd had with anyone in a long time. He didn't wanna think about the end of summer when Levi would leave and so would the minister and he'd be left with no one but Big Mike, who'd never been much of a talker to begin with. Suddenly the vast expanse of sky and grass felt narrower than Erwin'd ever realized.

 

Big Mike came around at the end of the week saying whatever that thing was that'd killed the calf on the Smith ranch had taken one of theirs as well and how they oughta go and drive some cattle near the river, pitch up a couple tents and try and catch the thing over the weekend. So on Friday after dinner Mike, Erwin and Levi drove the cows over to the pasture, letting them graze while the sun was still up. They fished a little, catching a couple trouts. When they lit a fire to fry them, Levi pulled a tub of Crisco out of his backpack and it got them all crispy and golden.

“Did Ma give you that?” Erwin asked him, but he shook his head. “Then how come you're carrying it around?”

“It's good for a lot of things,” Levi said, giving Erwin a weird sorta look, and it was only then he remembered how Levi'd rummaged in the small chest of drawers, how slick his hand had been when he'd touched him again, and he could feel his ears burning hot.

“Nan uses it to make my feet softer,” Big Mike muttered, flipping the trout over in the pan.

At sundown Mike got back on his horse and rode out to keep watch over the cattle. Erwin and Levi kept on sitting by the fire, Levi poking at the flames with a stick. The light fell over his eyes, making them look black when he glanced up at Erwin. He remembered then what the man had said about trouble and something inside him twisted. He wondered if Levi was thinking what he was thinking and suddenly the silence seemed full of it. Every time Levi looked at him, Erwin couldn't help thinking about it, about Levi's hand on his dick, slick and cool and bony, how quickly that touch changed into something warmer and softer and tighter. When he looked at Levi, Erwin wondered how it would feel to touch him and to feel him come, to watch his teeth gritting and his body tightening. No time for nothing like that last time and the memory of it still makes shame burn on Erwin's face.

“I'm gonna go, catch some sleep,” Levi said all of a sudden, standing up. “You comin'?”

For a second Erwin wondered if he should say no. The thought of being alone with Levi, being near him with Levi's rear pressed against his front... Well, Erwin had always wondered why it was hard for some folk to resist temptations like the drink or being married and having a little something on the side, but now he knew he'd never wonder no more. He looked up at Levi again, waiting by the tent door with the tub of Crisco in his hand and he thought about Leviticus, about every time he'd had a ham sandwich, about what the minister'd told him about thinking about things for himself. This didn't feel worse than a ham sandwich. Scripture didn't make it out to sound much worse than that neither.

“Yeah,” he muttered, already getting hard when he stood up from the fire.

It went much the same way as before and still real different. The feel of it was less thunder and more like the night really was, calmer but hot. Levi sat on Erwin, jeans hitched down past his buttocks, fingers fumbling for more Crisco when he pulled on Erwin's dick. They kissed. Levi tasted like smoke and fish, his lips felt smoother than Erwin would've thought. He couldn't say if he lasted longer now but Levi maybe anticipated it. He came while Erwin was still riding out his bliss, grunting and swearing and biting into Erwin's shoulder. It was better than Erwin'd thought it'd be, the feel of Levi, the heat of his body, every sound he made was better than all this land, the wind through the alfalfa, the roots Erwin'd grown and his daydreams about ripping them up.

“Don't it hurt?” he asked Levi afterward when they were lying next to each other.

“Not all pain is bad,” Levi told him, folding his arm under his head. “You said you wouldn't do that again.”

“I did say that,” Erwin agreed and sighed.

“D'you feel guilty now?”

Erwin thought about it for a second, then said, “I guess I feel guilty about not feelin' guilty.”

Levi snorted. “That's the dumbest bit of horse shit I ever heard,” he said and Erwin couldn't help laughing.

“Sure don't help nobody none,” he said.

Levi shot the coyote while he was on watch, so the next morning they packed up the tents and rode on home well on time to get washed up for church the next morning. Erwin caught Levi washing his shirt and tie on the steps of the guest place and watched him from his bedroom window, happy to be looking at him without nobody knowing he was doing it. He'd never seen anyone who looked half as interesting. He liked the way Levi kept lifting up the shirt and squinting at it, like hunting some stain that was barely there in the first place. He was squinting the same way the next day when he stared up at the visiting minister starting his sermon.

It wasn't what any of them were used to. Minister Smith was always soft-spoken, even when he talked with passion, but this Revered Nick was different. He was near spitting when he preached, leaning so far in the pulpit Erwin thought he might well fall out of it. He talked about all them things Erwin feared the week before, divine retribution, hellfire, God seeing your sins and judging you for them already. Erwin tried to catch minister Smith's face, but could only make out the back of his head on the front row by the altar.

“And now they're sayin',” the minister went on, “out there in the big cities they're saying that things that the Bible clearly says are sins aren't no sins at all.”

Erwin felt Levi shifting on the seat next to his.

“They say it's alright to break the sacred vows you've made to your husband before God,” Reverend Nick continued. “They say it's alright to keep babies, God's blessed miracles, from being born just because they don't want to change their own selfish ways and make room in their lives for loving a child. They say it is alright to go around with a dozen people before settling on someone you're gonna marry so that by the time they do, they're like crumpled up pieces of paper and I pity the man who's gonna have to try and write on it.”

The church had never been more quiet than it was whenever the preacher took a break. Erwin could even hear the shallow breaths he drew up in the pulpit.

“Fornication,” he bellowed. “Adultery. Sodomy. They'll do their best to tell you these things are natural, that they're something people were born to do. They'll say we're no better than animals. They'll compare the sacred sacrament of marriage to buying a car, saying it's only good sense to take a few for a test drive before you settle on the one you want. But people aren't cars. And people aren't animals either. God has given you the gift of reason so you could read his word and live according to his will because he knows what's best for you. Because God is perfect. He sees all, and he knows all. You can't know yourself like he does. You can't know the consequence of your sins like he does. So like a wise father, he tries to keep you from that fate. And like a willful child, you try and go against his better judgment. But God has given each of us enough good sense so we can choose to do what's right.”

Erwin caught Pa nodding his head at that.

“Yes, our minds are a gift,” Reverend Nick went on. “They are what separates us from the beasts that walk this earth, living by their instincts, heeding no voice of reason. It's what sets us above the animals who God put on this earth to offer us service. But I tell you now, there are ways in which we are worse than they are. Where we are worse even than the snake in the garden of Eden.”

Erwin looked around himself at the people, all them gazes transfixed on the preacher, like there ain't suddenly been no other thing on God's green earth. He felt some of them were holding their breaths waiting for the next words.

“You'll never see an animal going against its nature,” the Reverend said. “You'll never see a wolf sparing the life of a lamb it has set its teeth on. You'll never see a deer looking at a huntsman and not trying to run from him. And you'll never see a bull try to mount another bull, nor a stallion trying to mount a stallion.”

There was a soft thud to Erwin's left when the heel of Levi's boot hit the floor. Erwin glanced at him. His jaw looked like someone had glued his teeth together.

“In this man is alone, going against what's natural, the natural order than God has set for us here on earth,” Reverend Nick said. “That's what makes the sin of sodomy so abhorrent in the eyes of God. Not only does it go against the law he sets out for us in his word, it goes against the laws of nature that he has set to govern his creation. It goes against the very foundations of–”

There was a sudden hush that grew out of Levi standing up from his seat. Erwin could see everyone turning to look at him, could see the cold stare he fixed on the Reverend before he started moving. Behind him Pa was whispering something that didn't catch Erwin's ear. His heart was beating too loud for him to hear it.

“The very foundations of order... And... God's will has...”

The Reverend's words kept trailing off when Levi reached the aisle and started walking away from the altar. There was no other sound but the fall of his boots on the white wooden floor, not until the doors of the church swung shut behind him and the congregations exploded into whispers. Erwin could feel the eyes on him and his Ma and Pa. The noise died down only little by little when the Reverend continued his sermon. Erwin didn't hear next to nothing of it, thinking about Levi waiting by the pick-up, but when the service ended and they all walked out, Levi wasn't there.

“Get in the truck, both of you,” Pa grunted, telling Erwin he was too angry to drive.

He spotted Levi not far from the church, walking back toward the ranch with his hands in his pockets and his head drawn down between his shoulders. Erwin started slowing down, but Pa grabbed his arm, twisting it till it hurt.

“Don't you dare slow down for that thing,” he growled. “I should've listened to my gut when he first set foot on my lands, oughta sent him back where he came from. I knew he was bad news from the moment I saw him. God damn makes me sick thinking about it.”

Erwin kept his eyes on Levi for as long as he could and tried to drive off again as soon as they got back on the ranch, but the look Pa gave him told him well enough that if he drove out to get Levi, he might as well never come back again. So he paced back and forth on the porch, listening to Pa ranting on about how he ain't never made a bigger mistake than hiring a good-for-nothing like Levi. Ma said nothing, not even to the ugliest words that Pa called Levi, and Erwin couldn't say which hurt him worse.

It was late in the afternoon when Levi finally walked through the gates, dust all the way up the legs of his boots. He saw Erwin on the porch but went straight into the guest place. Erwin followed him there, didn't bothered to knock but stayed by the door, looking at Levi across the small room where he sat on the bed, looking tired and angry.

“Was afraid someone might've run you over,” Erwin told him, feeling angry when Levi snorted.

“Who said no one tried?” he asked, pulling off his boots and setting them by the nightstand.

Erwin huffed. “See, I don't understand you none, Levi,” he said, wanting to pull on his own hair. “I don't see why you gotta bring this kinda trouble on yourself.”

“There's some things a man's gotta do,” Levi told him, staring him straight in the eyes, “to be able to live with himself afterwards. This was one of them things.”

The words left Erwin mute though when he'd walked into the room he'd had a lot more to say. He took the words with him back to his bedroom, kept mulling them over when he drove back to the church later with Ma's baked goods for the minister. All during the drive he kept trying to fix up his thoughts so he'd know what to say to the man, going back and forth between telling him the truth, confessing the whole thing to see what he got to say about it. But his anger was too hot in his chest and he could barely finish a thought before Levi's words had cut through it and made it near nothing at all.

He stopped the pick-up on the church parking lot and stared at the doors, imagining Levi walking through them and running down the steps. He thought about all them things Pa'd said about Levi, how he'd been saying them about Erwin too though he didn't know it. He thought about Ma sitting there all quiet with her hands folded onto her lap, saying nothing. He thought about the minister letting Reverend Nick preach a sermon like that in his church to his congregation, letting him take over while he ran out to the wide world. All of it made Erwin even angrier, sad and angry like his Ma had been when he'd told her the minister was leaving.

Remembering that, Erwin turned to the basket of cornbread sitting on the passenger seat, neat squares Ma hadn't let anyone touch since she'd made them all for the minister. Without a clear thought why but still with great certainty, Erwin started lifting them pieces out of the basket, digging through them all the way to the bottom. His hand closed around a folded up sheet of paper that he opened, wanting to and not wanting to, feeling sick to his stomach when he read the words: _You leaving would hurt me worse than the rumours._

Erwin left the basket on the church steps, folding the note on top of the cornbread, then drove out toward the dark clouds massing up on the horizon and he felt like his head was full of the same. Nothing felt right, nothing felt like it used to before Levi came to the ranch. Erwin felt like the man had pulled up all his roots and shown him how rotten they'd become, how the ground in which they'd been sitting was all acid and salt underneath too. Erwin couldn't say if he'd ever thought about things for himself, like the minister'd told him to do. Seemed there was too much he'd forced a blind eye to for him to believe he had.

He went straight back to Levi when got back to the ranch, finding him where he'd left him on the guest house bed with the green army bag by the dresses, all packed full.

“Pa told you to go?”

“Said he wanted me gone first thing tomorrow,” Levi said. “Guess he's got that Christian charity after all.”

Erwin looked at the bag and bit his lips for a few seconds before saying, “Wanna take the pick-up, go for a ride?”

Levi smirked. “Only if you'll let me drive.”

Turned out Levi was more reckles behind the wheel than anyone else Erwin'd ever seen, like he'd never heard of no other part of a car but the gas pedal and the wheel. There were times Erwin wasn't sure he could even see over through the windshield and he didn' quite know how they managed to stay on the road for the whole trip. They rode up the side of a hill, the highest Erwin knew in the area, parking on the top and looking out across the grasslands where the rain was falling like a silver curtain over the green.

“It ain't a mountain,” Erwin told Levi, “but I reckon it's the closest thing we got.”

“It'll do,” Levi said, leaning back in the seat and looking out at the wall of rain. “I don't know if you've thought about–”

“Would you mind if we just...” Erwin interrupted him, not really wanting to hear nothing more now when his mind didn't have none of the peace that the land had. “D'you reckon we could just watch the rain?”

“Sure thing,” Levi said, bringing his hand right by Erwin's, fingers almost touching.


	4. Chapter 4

It took Erwin near three hours to convince Pa to let Levi stay on the ranch another couple days, just until they'd had time to fix the barn roof, since there was no knowing how worn the structures were and since someone like Big Mike couldn't hardly climb up there or he might just fall right on through and break his neck. He could see on Pa's face he felt like he'd just agreed on letting the devil fix his barn, but Erwin'd counted on him being too much of a cheapskate to hire somebody new now.

“He ain't coming under my roof no more,” Pa told him. “Not to get his meals, not to get a drink of water. You can take his meals out to him, but don't you be spendin' more time with him that you have to.”

Erwin nodded at that but didn't speak, 'cause speaking would've felt more like lying. When he took the dinner tray that Ma handed out to him, she grabbed his hands for a moment and looked him in the eye without saying nothing. Erwin didn't know what she was trying to tell him with that and he didn't much care neither, still thinking about that note he'd found in the basket of baked goods for the minister. He near ran the tray to the guest place, sitting down next to Levi on the bed when he started eating the food that'd already gone cold hours ago.

When Erwin told him he could stay another couple days, Levi nodded once and went back to his food saying, “Got them wrinkles on my shirt for nothing.”

Erwin glanced at the army bag and laughed a little. “How come you turned out like that?” he asked Levi who shrugged.

“Ain't never seen a stain that I liked,” he said, “nor a crease on a shirt neither.”

“Ain't it hard to keep that up on the road?”

Levi emptied his mouth, then said, “Sometimes. You gotta learn how best to do it.”

“If I came with you,” Erwin joked before he could stop himself, “you could teach me how.”

“If you came with me,” Levi replied, looking up from his plate, “I'd take care of your shirts myself.”

That seemed to Erwin to make it too real, so he forced himself to laugh and said, “Gotta start on the barn roof first thing tomorrow after we've moved the cattle.”

“Can't push my luck when it comes to your daddy, can I?” Levi said, scoffing. “Still, gotta take a break here and there I bet. It's hard work fixin' roofs.”

“It sure is,” Erwin agreed, turning to look away from Levi's grinning face when it made that heat pool up in the pit of his stomach.

 

They started the work early the next day, setting old Millie up in front of a cart and moving them supplies over to the new barn. They climbed up onto the roof, Levi much faster than Erwin, and took a look at the damage that turned out to be worse than Erwin had thought. He sent up a little prayer for that, though it made him feel bad afterwards.

“Best start by pulling out all the tiles that've rotted,” Levi told him, pushing his hat back toward his neck. “There's water damage all through this section here. Take us well to the end of the week to get it done, even without them breaks.”

And still they took a long one that afternoon, getting right to it with their jeans rolled down to their ankles. Levi took Erwin's dick into his mouth this time, giving Erwin a new kinda pleasure that made his world that much more wide and strange again. Levi spat the mess of it onto the floor of the barn once it was done, messing it up with the sole of his boot. Erwin didn't know what to expect it to taste like when he got on his knees to give Levi the same. The whole thing took him by surprise, how good it felt to have Levi pulling his hair, to have him push into him all frantic, like he ain't never had no one do that to him before. By the time Erwin got that mouthful of salt, he was hard again in his own fist and some of the fresh mess landed on the dark green of Levi's boot, showing too clear against it for Erwin's liking. He spat on it after swallowing and wiped it off with the bandanna Levi passed him. He frowned as he watched Levi tying it right back around his neck.

“Don't the mess bother you?” Erwin asked him but he just scoffed.

“Don't mind havin' somethin' of yours on me,” he said, pulling up his jeans and sitting down on the floor; they'd not had their lunch before getting to it.

Erwin sat down next to him, taking the bread and cheese Levi passed him and starting to eat, easing that light-headedness that had struck him again. They talked while they ate, about nothing in particular, but even so when it was time to go back, Erwin wished he didn't have to. He felt bad having his dinner with Ma and Pa, and even worse when he had to tell the old man the fixing of the roof was likely to take all week.

“Between a rock and a God dee hard place,” Pa muttered. “Don't want him on my ranch no more but I'll be damned if I'm gonna end up with his blood on my hands either.”

And Erwin knew it was no joke that should Levi go back up to town or show his face on the church yard someone might wanna take matters into his own hands about that. That night he said a little prayer about that, how he was grateful that God had given Pa enough decency not to throw Levi out to the wolves, so to speak, but kept him right near Erwin – if even only for six more days.

And they really started running fast after that, them days, dashing past Erwin so quick he felt every evening like it must've been just an hour ago that he got out of bed that morning. Between the work and the fooling around and talking afterwards, Erwin didn't hardly have time to think or do anything else but have his dinner. Before he knew it, it was Wednesday, and that set a kind of fire in his chest and made him sneak out to the guest place once Ma and Pa had lain down for the night. Levi's mouth was hot and sweet, like the scent of honeysuckle on a parched summer night, and his bony hands stretched Erwin all out on the little bed that squeaked so loud once they got going that Erwin was sure his parents would hear it all the way across the yard.

“I sure am gonna miss this,” Levi told him when they were lying next to each other afterwards, and the words made Erwin's chest ache.

“Yeah,” he muttered, a part of him feeling like sitting up and getting away from that, but another part never wanting Levi to stop leaning against his arm.

They were quiet and Erwin tried real hard not to think about it, but the thought kept pushing up like a weed no matter how many times he cut it down. He tried to tell himself that he'd feel better once he prepared himself over the next couple of days, but not a single bit of him believed that for a second.

“You know,” Levi finally said, breaking the silence, “I bet there are a lot of colleges out west. Bet there are colleges for all kinds of people who want to learn a new trade or just find out stuff about the world or–”

“Really wish you didn't start with that again,” Erwin told him, though he wished real hard he didn't have to. “I thought we talked about this already.”

“Yeah, you said what you had to say,” Levi countered, sounding angry and looking even angrier.

Erwin left pretty soon after that once he realised Levi was gonna keep quiet, for the rest of the night most likely; he thought it was a little bit childish, that, but he didn't wanna start nothing neither. Back in his own bed, he tried again not to think about it, about leaving, but he couldn't stop imagining it: saying goodbye to all of it, the ranch, the swaying of the grass, Ma and Pa and the minister and his whole life.

He'd been so caught up in that thought of Levi leaving that he'd not spared nearly a thought to the minister and his Ma all week, until on Friday the man drove over to the ranch. He asked after Erwin and waited for him on the porch with Pa while he was out driving the cattle with Levi. Even after all them days, Erwin wasn't sure if he wanted to talk with the minister or not, but he went out walking with him among the hay field, where the new grass was starting to come in not even knee high yet.

“I reckon...” the minister started but seemed to not know how to finish, saying, “Well, I don't really know what to say to you right now, Erwin, if I'm being completely honest.”

Erwin didn't know any better what to say to the minister neither, so he kept quiet, kept his eyes on the toes of his boots.

“I suppose you must be feeling awful confused about...” the minister tried again with no better luck than before, his words falling short and ending with a sigh. He took a moment to think, trying for a different approach when he started again and saying, “You know how we've talked about interpretation, Erwin? About... There being different views to every story depending on who's telling it and who's hearing it?”

Erwin nodded, not looking at the man.

“I don't know how to say any of this without sounding like I'm making excuses,” the minister said. “All I can say is that... Well, sometimes things are complicated, and there are many versions of who's right and who's wrong depending on who you ask.”

“Right,” Erwin muttered. And it did make sense to him – or would've if it had been regarding anyone else but himself.

“I guess what I'm trying to say is...” the minister went on, pausing again for a few seconds. “I guess what I'm trying to say is that I wish you didn't see me as someone who's only wronged you – and others,” he said and Erwin could tell he was looking at him, but kept his own eyes still on the ground. “Sometimes people just... Do their best. And sometimes their best isn't good enough. But I'm afraid sometimes it... Is what it is, at the end of the day.”

Erwin knew he'd never heard the minister struggling so much to explain something to him and he wasn't sure how he felt, hearing the man stumble over them words like that. Guess he felt a bit better knowing that none of this was easy for the minister neither, and maybe he didn't really know how to feel about Erwin, just like Erwin didn't really know how to feel about him anymore. Maybe he'd been angry once too, like Erwin was angry now – angry and hurt and disappointed. It was hard to tell without knowing all them things about it, but Erwin felt like he didn't wanna know so he didn't ask. Maybe the minister'd hoped he would, 'cause he sighed again as if to fill the silence with something.

“If you'd like an apology, I can give you one,” he told Erwin, “though I honest to God don't know how things could've gone any differently – how either of us could've done things differently. I wish I could give you something better than this, but I also don't know what that something would be.”

“Well,” Erwin said, “I don't really know what I want right now either.”

“I understand,” the minister said, pausing. “You know, you've grown up to be one of the best men I've ever known,” he told Erwin, sounding so strange and broken that Erwin wished he'd not said nothing at all. “You've got a good head on your shoulders – and even more important, you've got a good heart. That you get from your Ma, no doubt.”

Erwin thought about her for the first time then, but all it did was double the anger and hurt he felt.

“I wish you don't blame her for any of this,” the minister said then like guessing Erwin's thoughts. “She only tried to do what was best for you – and for me too I suppose. I guess...”

The minister fell quiet for so long Erwin started wondering whether he was gonna talk at all anymore.

“I guess I shouldn't have let her do it,” he finally finished. “But then, I don't think it was or is within my power to let her do anything.”

“Right,” Erwin muttered, though he couldn't help being just as angry with his Ma as he was with the minister.

“I also came over to tell you,” the man continued, “that I'm not thinking about going away anymore.”

“You're not?”

“Not now, anyway,” the minister said. “You know, I came to the conclusion that there's a difference between leaving and running away. I started to feel like what I was doing was less the former and more the latter.”

Erwin thought about the words while they walked on, circling back toward the ranch once they reached the farthest edge of the hay field. The minister didn't talk after that neither, not until they came within sight of the house and he turned to Erwin again. When Erwin looked at him, he could suddenly see all them things everyone'd always been whispering about, all them ways they looked alike, from the brows to the eyes to the chin. He wondered whether he'd be running away from that face if he left right now himself.

“I understand if you'd rather not see me more than you have to anymore,” the minister said, “though I must admit, it is a sad thought. I've so enjoyed our talks. Getting to know you, being a part of your life – if even from a distance.”

Erwin didn't answer. He remembered how just a week ago the thought of the minister leaving made him real sad and made his life beyond Levi leaving seem duller and bleaker. But now he didn't know what to think anymore, whether he wanted to see more or less of the man or to see none of him at all.

“Of course you don't have to decide anything right now,” the minister went on. “We could just... See how things go. Let them take their own pace.”

Erwin nodded along to that, still not knowing what to say and thinking the minister's suggestion was as good as any other. He walked the man back to his car, watching as Ma came out onto the porch. The look she shared with the minister then was one Erwin'd never seen before on anyone, full of the kinda emotions Erwin'd never felt before, but even so, they made him think of Levi leaving again, and after the minister had left, Erwin went to sit with him in the guest place.

“What did the minister want?” Levi asked him but Erwin shrugged.

“Nothin' much,” he said, dodging the look Levi gave him by lying down on the bed. He didn't really know why he'd lied. He'd told Levi a lot of things he'd never told anyone before, but this one didn't seem like something you could talk about, not with anyone.

“He ain't warned you off me?”

“No, he ain't,” Erwin told Levi, looking at his back when he turned away, thinking of Sunday when he'd go.

“Well,” Levi said himself, “he ain't gotta worry much longer.”

Erwin agreed with a grunt, thinking for a few second and then saying, “We oughta go fishing. Before you go.”

Levi snorted. “Bet your old man would love that,” he said.

“I'm serious,” Erwin told him. “We oughta go. Tomorrow. Just you and me.”

Levi was quiet for a little while, looking at Erwin all strange before he finally said, “Sure. Just you and me this time.”

 

They packed the tent and other supplies onto Millie and Sawyer's backs the next evening, riding out right after dinner. Pa did try and stop Erwin, questioning him at the table while Ma did the dishes in the corner all quiet. In the end Erwin didn't know what he oughta have given as a reason so he said he felt like eating fish and that they'd get a better catch by the two of them. They rode out, racing through the new alfalfa and cutting the riding time with a couple minutes though they didn't mean to.

They pitched up their tent by the river, never even pretending to fish but sitting instead by the fire and talking. Levi told Erwin about the little apartment his Mama and him had in Dubois, about the little shop she used to work in and how he used to have to play in the back room while she worked on account of his Mama raising him by herself. And Erwin told him about his own childhood where the summers seemed to last for years, the way he used to play with Big Mike (who was only called Mike back then) and how they used to ride horses to the river, just like they did now.

“Life didn't use to be so hard back then,” Erwin said but smiled anyway. “Guess ranch work makes you grow old faster than you would otherwise.”

“Sure does,” Levi agreed, resting the heel of his other boot on the toes of the other one. “Pretty sure I got the back of a forty year old, what with the bronc bustin' and all.”

Erwin grunted. “You reckon you can find something better out in a city?”

“Could be I will, could be I won't,” Levi told him, “but I ain't never gonna find out unless I try.”

“I guess,” Erwin replied. “You thinkin' 'bout somethin' in a factory or somethin'?”

“I'll figure it out once I get there,” Levi said. “Wouldn't mind doin' somethin' in a cafe or somethin'. Pouring coffee, wiping tables – don't sound too bad to me.”

Erwin stayed quiet for a while and then had to say, “You know, I envy you, Levi. Must be real nice, bein' able to just leave, to go wherever you feel like goin' and live day by day like you do. Must be a sweet life.”

“Most days it is,” Levi agreed, “but I ain't sayin' I'd be livin' like this if I had a choice. You can get sick of it, the run-down motels and tryin' to squeeze a livin' pay out of some cheapskate's pocket every time you take a job. One of them reasons why I'm tryin' to get away.”

“So you don't think about goin' to college?” Erwin asked Levi who shrugged.

“Maybe, if things go well,” he said, “if I get settled down good I might wanna get my high school diploma and go on to learn a proper trade somewhere. Business or somethin'. I like the idea of workin' for myself.”

“Big plans,” Erwin commented and Levi laughed, low and quiet.

“Gotta live for something,” he said, “even if it's years away. Even if it ain't never gonna happen at all.”

Erwin grunted again and kept staring at the flames, already thinking ahead to the night when Levi continued.

“You know,” he said, not looking at Erwin, “bet you could get into college real easy out there. You got your diploma already, and you're smarter than the devil.”

“Levi–”

“Quit it. I'm serious,” Levi went on. “You got so much more in you than ranch work. You could do anythin', _be_ anythin' if you–”

“Now you quit it,” Erwin snapped, growing angry. “I don't know why you gotta keep talkin' 'bout this. Maybe it's 'cause you ain't never had a place you belonged to, but I can't just up and leave. I ain't like you, my life ain't like yours is. I got a family and a home here.”

Levi pressed his lips together so tight they near disappeared from his face. He poked at the flames with a stick without saying nothing until he muttered, “Right. I don't know nothin' 'bout your life so I oughta keep my mouth shut.”

“Right,” Erwin said, his anger keeping him quiet. But Levi was a different kinda man.

“You know what?” he growled. “You don't know nothin' about where I've belonged and who my family's been. And you got a lot of nerve sittin' there talkin' about this shit, considering how things are with your folks.”

“What do you mean by that?” Erwin asked, his dread suddenly piercing through his anger.

“Cut the shit, Erwin,” Levi spat. “Everybody knows Pa ain't even your real daddy and if you weren't keepin' yourself so fuckin' blind, you'd fucking admit it to yourself too. 'Cause there ain't no way you don't see it, and there ain't no way you don't know.”

Erwin bit his teeth together to keep himself from saying something he'd come to regret, listening as Levi went on.

“The people in this town are just like them folks back home,” Levi said. “Fuckin' hypocrites, all of 'em. You know they'd wrap a noose around your neck too if they knew what you get up to, and your Pa would be leadin' them to it.”

“That ain't fair,” Erwin said, getting to his feet. “That ain't Pa and you know it.”

Levi got up too when he said, “The only thing I know is that your Pa is a mean, bitter old son-of-a-bitch, and if you don't quit living your life just thinkin' of what _he_ wants, you're gonna end up just as bitter and mean as him – or worse, plain miserable like your Ma and the minister.”

“Now you take that back,” Erwin whispered, pointing his finger at Levi's face but Levi just scoffed.

“Or what?” he said and spat on the ground. “What you gonna do? You think you can kick my ass?”

“I'm warnin' you, Levi.”

“You're warnin' me,” Levi said and laughed. “I'll tell you what, Erwin Smith, and I'll tell you good. You can warn me all you want, but I know you. And I know you ain't got nothing in you that my uncle Kenny didn't already show me when I was younger by half than I am now.”

They stood there for a moment, just weighing each other out and Erwin couldn't think of nothing to say since he ain't never had to think of things like this to say to anyone before. But Levi had. You could taste it when he spoke, how he'd learned to give as good as he got from his first day of school, how he'd learned viciousness and back talk from the people who'd hurt him the worst.

“You ain't gonna learn nothin' here,” he told Erwin, quiet. “You ain't gonna _be_ nothin'. You're just gonna keep livin' for livin's sake, get a wife and a couple of kids and you're gonna hate them for not givin' your life the meaning you thought they would. And she's gonna hate you for that, and your kids are gonna grow up wishin' they was somewhere else, anywhere else, just like–”

Levi shut up when Erwin shoved him, stayed quiet and still for a good two seconds before swinging his fist into Erwin's face. The hardest anyone had ever punched him, and the pain was worse for who'd done it. They stood still, staring for a couple more seconds before going for each other fists first, leaning, pushing, punching. But what started as wrestling turned into that other thing real quick, with Levi bossing Erwin and telling him to pin him down. They did it right there, all out in the open, sprawled over the grass that Levi kept pulling up with his fists once Erwin got inside him. They finished near in time with each other and by the end of it Erwin couldn't tell which of the grunts and moans he heard were his and which were Levi's.

Afterwards they washed up in the river and sat back down by the fire, staying quiet for a long time and Erwin wasn't thinking about what Levi had said – he was only thinking about how he'd miss even that vicious mouth of his.

“You know,” Levi finally whispered, “I guess there's not much use in me sayin' this now, after everything...” His words trailed off for a couple seconds as he stopped to stare at the moonlight river. “But if you came with me when I go... Well, I sure wouldn't mind that.”

And Erwin already knew somehow that Levi had been upset about that before, just like he'd been upset about the minister and about Levi leaving and him staying behind.

“I really wish I could,” he said, wanting to continue with something but falling short on them words.

“I know,” Levi said, quiet again for a while before continuing. “It was you gave me the idea – about getting' my diploma and goin' to school and all. I guess I figured I oughta make the most of my head while I'm still draggin' it around.”

“Well I'm glad,” Erwin said. “I'm real glad if I made you think that. You deserve to get your schoolin', Levi. Just like everybody else.”

“Yeah, well,” Levi said, scratching the undercut of his hair and throwing a log into the fire. “You know if you say everybody that includes you too, right?”

Erwin sighed, looking up at the stars. “I know,” he muttered, glad when Levi didn't go back to that, staying quiet for a long time again.

“You know,” Levi whispered again and broke that silence, “you remind me of my favourite kind of horse. Green broke, gotta watch every move you make so you won't spook it. Gotta build that trust from nothin'.”

Erwin looked at him, aching so bad in his chest he thought he might cry out.

“Best way to know a horse,” Levi went on. “Best way to know how to work with it, to know if you make a good match or not.”

The words were spoken so gentle and quiet Erwin could barely hear them, like Levi himself had been afraid of them somehow. Erwin could see why, could feel it in how frantic his heart was and how cold and numb his hands.

“I think we make a good match, Erwin,” Levi finally whispered, staring out across the water. “I think we make a real good match.”

For a while Erwin didn't know what to say. “You're right,” he told Levi in the end. “We make a damn good match.”

They spent the night sleeping real close together – just sleeping, and though he sure didn't mind the other thing, Erwin didn't need nothing more right then. Levi felt small against his side, tough and bony, and he smelled like grass and earth and rain – like the land, like the swaying alfalfa and the vast open sky. And that's how Erwin knew if he went, he wouldn't miss any of them things. Levi was more home than any of it. Levi was better than home.

 

In the morning they packed up their things and rode on back to the ranch, going slower than they had to if still faster than Erwin would've liked. He kept looking over at the door of the guest place while putting on his bolo tie and combing his hair, but Levi kept indoors. The thought of him packing up his things was bad enough to make Erwin sick to his stomach.

He heard nothing of the sermon the minister gave, didn't care to hear it, couldn't think of anything but Levi. A part of him was dreading that the man had taken off while they were all at church, and he couldn't get no peace from that thought until he got back to the ranch and saw Levi sitting on the steps of the guest place, the old army bag next to him all packed.

“You take him somewhere far enough so he don't wander back,” Pa told Erwin, like talking about some animal. “Gotta get things right around here again. Like they were before that thing showed up.”

And Erwin didn't say nothing to that, just waited until Levi had thrown the bag onto the back of the pick-up and gotten onto the passenger seat. Neither one of them said a thing and they kept their eyes on the road too, like any word or any look would've been enough to break something, and to break it for good.

“Well,” Erwin eventually had to say, stopping the pick-up by the side of the road some twenty miles from the ranch. “Guess this is it.”

Levi still said nothing, still didn't look at Erwin or touch him. He jumped out of the car, grabbed the army bag and started walking, the dark green boots kicking up dust from the road. Erwin kept staring after him, counting the steps he took, telling himself once he got to ten he'd start the car, then twenty, then thirty. He was past a hundred when he finally got his hands working and as he drove back, the blue of the sky looked the same as it had when he'd driven over to Mrs. Hardy's, just as clear and vast – just as empty.

At the ranch Erwin thought about saddling Sawyer and riding out to the cattle, knew he was supposed to be doing that, but the thought of seeing Millie standing there with nothing to do and no one to ride her made Erwin feel like someone had tied a rope around his neck. Instead he sat on the back porch, watching the wind cutting through the grass. He felt nothing, and right at that moment, it seemed worse than feeling something.

“Hello, stranger.”

Erwin glanced behind himself but said nothing to Ma, not even once she'd crossed the porch and sat down on the steps next to Erwin. They sat there quiet, like neither knew what to say to the other.

“You know, I like to think about when you were a little boy,” Ma finally said. “I like to remember how you'd come runnin' home through the fields, carrying a bunch of flowers home to me, telling me what all of their names were.”

Erwin remembered that. Ma's hair hadn't been so grey back then, and her hands hadn't been so wrinkled, but her smile had been the same – always a little wistful, like it was now.

“I loved how I could love the land through you” she went on. “How I could love it the same way you did. And once you got older and you learned all them things the land gives us, I could be grateful for them all over too.”

There was something real distant in Ma's eyes then, like she was half gone back and only half in the here and now. When she turned to Erwin, she breathed a quiet laugh.

“But it's funny,” she said, “how oftentimes people can't see something about others they ain't felt for themselves.”

“What do you mean by that?” Erwin asked her and she laughed again, but he saw there were tears in her eyes.

“I knew how much you loved the land,” she said, “because I'd once loved it like that too. So I knew what to look for – or come to think of it, maybe I taught it to you somehow without even knowing.”

Erwin watched her as she stared across the field, only thinking to wipe the tears off her face once they reached her chin.

“You know,” she said, “some folk say being a mother is hard. But I never thought that. To me there's only ever been one rule, and it's a real simple one.”

She turned to look at him and put her hand on his cheek, warm and gentle, like she used to when he was a boy.

“You just have to love your child,” she said, “and do what you can to make sure he's happy.”

Erwin stared into her eyes for a while, not really knowing what she was saying, but just as he was about to ask she suddenly stood up, still wiping her eyes.

“The minister's right, you know,” she told Erwin, fiddling with the hem of her apron. “You really oughta go.”

“Ma–”

“But he's sayin' it for the wrong reasons,” she interrupted him. “He was always short-sighted about that. 'Cause at the end of the day, it's not about what you did to get the food on the table. It's about who you share it with.”

Erwin fell quiet, watching her as she turned to him again.

“Pa's gone over to Old Man Zacharius' ranch,” she said. “He'll take another hour to get back most like. He had to take the old pick-up – you know, since you were out.”

“Right,” Erwin muttered, looking after her as she walked back into the house, jumping up a couple minutes' later and rushing through the door, giving her a hug that got them tears running down her face again.

“As far as I'm concerned,” she said, “you can always come back home.”

 

In the end it didn't take him ten minutes to pack up his things. He thought about leaving notes, but then figured post cards or letters would do just as well. He stopped by the gas station to fill up the pick-up before driving down the road, his mind going 'just a little bit farther, just a little bit farther', his eyes expecting to see him, his heart near giving out by the time he finally did, walking along the side of the road, the army bag thrown over one shoulder, his boots still kicking up dust. He looked back once he heard Erwin coming, stopping dead on his tracks once he saw whose pick-up it was.

“Heard you were going somewhere out west,” Erwin told him once he'd stopped the truck. “Thought I'd give you a ride – if you want one.”

He watched Levi grinning, felt his own heart skipping a beat when he heard the army bag landing on the back of the pick-up.

“I gotta admit though,” Levi told him, climbing onto the passenger seat, “I lied to you.”

“What about?” Erwin asked, frowning when Levi grinned.

“Just about washing your shirts,” he said. “You can wash them your own damn self.”

“So long as you teach me how,” Erwin told him, starting the pick-up and turning back onto the road that stretched out before them, wide and open, cutting through the grass.


End file.
